Bad Feelings Lingering Over Braun’s Victory

On the eve of the seventh game of the World Series last fall, Bud Selig held a news conference at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. The Cardinals and the Texas Rangers had staged a breathtaking game the night before, and the sport had reached the last day of a scintillating two-month sprint to the finish.

The glow was hard-earned, and Selig was happy to bask in it. Baseball had not reached a World Series Game 7 in nine years, and the owners were close to completing a labor agreement with the union. It would be the third agreement in a row without a work stoppage — evidence, it seemed, that the players and the owners had a common vision and an understanding that both could share in the game’s prosperity.

Selig took more than a dozen questions that afternoon, and spoke almost 3,500 words. Among the words not spoken were “drug policy,” “testosterone” and “urine sample.” Yet before we could even reach the first games of spring training, those words are much in play.

The exhilarating postseason, it turns out, was too good to be true. Or something like that. Ryan Braun, later voted the most valuable player in the National League, failed a drug test taken on the first day of the playoffs. He will not be suspended, but the story has not ended there.

At a time when baseball could still be trumpeting its tightened drug policy, which includes blood testing for human growth hormone, the Braun drama is like a toxin, thought to be buried but bubbling back to the surface.

Players are suspicious about the confidentiality of the testing program after news of Braun’s positive test leaked to ESPN in December. The commissioner’s office is furious at the arbitrator, Shyam Das, whose role in future appeals is now uncertain. It is hard to know exactly what to make of Braun, who won his case on a procedural point, not by challenging the veracity of the test.

Braun’s victory was the first by a player against Major League Baseball’s drug police, which had been 12-0 in such cases. Baseball reacted with an aggressive statement from Rob Manfred, the executive vice president for labor relations.

Manfred said M.L.B. “vehemently disagrees” with the decision of the arbitrator, and that snippet got most of the attention. But the first part of Manfred’s statement was also telling, and it explains why baseball chose not to simply let Das’s decision stand on its own.

“It has always been Major League Baseball’s position that no matter who tests positive, we will exhaust all avenues in pursuit of the appropriate discipline,” Manfred said. “We have been true to that position in every instance, because baseball fans deserve nothing less.”

Photo

Ryan Braun won his drug case on a procedural point. Players are suspicious about the confidentiality of the testing program.Credit
Paul Connors/Associated Press

The statement underscores the position that Braun did not win his case because he is the M.V.P. and the pillar of the commissioner’s hometown team. Drug testing (with penalties) had nabbed fading superstars, but never a player like Braun, a face of the supposed post-steroid era in the prime of his career.

In other words, Manfred was saying: we cannot punish Braun, but our program was tough enough to catch him — and, by the way, we still think he cheated. From baseball’s standpoint, once Braun won, the issue was no longer about him. The important thing was to ward off cynicism of its testing program.

But in doing so, the commissioner’s office provoked a fight with Braun — a well-spoken, well-educated and well-prepared adversary. If Braun never took a banned substance, he has every right to holler loud and long about being a victim. And that is exactly what he did last Friday with a passionate speech at the Brewers’ camp in Phoenix.

One person close to Braun said Braun “asserted his innocence the way an innocent man would.” That sounds good, and if you have spent any time with Braun, who is eminently likable, you probably want to believe it.

But the problem is we still do not know how synthetic testosterone got into both of Braun’s urine samples. Braun said he does not know, either, but he did try to raise questions about the collection process and the character of the man who collected his sample.

The collector, Dino Laurenzi Jr., issued a lengthy statement on Tuesday defending himself, his methods and his track record. He also hired a prominent lawyer. Braun has not responded to Laurenzi’s statement.

Selig declined an interview request Wednesday, but this must be a painful blow to him. It would be bad publicity for any star to be tangled in such a mess, but Braun has particular resonance to Selig.

On Sept. 23, Braun launched an eighth-inning home run at Miller Park to put the Brewers ahead for good on the night they clinched first place for the first time since 1982. Selig, who took the franchise to Milwaukee and still lives there, was moved by Braun’s home run and the civic celebration of it.

A few days later, he compared it to the home run hit by Hank Aaron, a game-ending blast that clinched the 1957 pennant for Selig’s beloved Milwaukee Braves. In a serendipitous bit of symmetry, Aaron’s home run came 54 years to the day before Braun’s. Then Braun hit .405 in the playoffs.

It all seemed to punctuate Braun’s status as a worthy heir to Aaron, a beacon to a new generation of Milwaukee baseball fans. Now there is no such clarity, just a story that only grows murkier, and never should have gotten out in the first place.

Correction: March 3, 2012

The On Baseball column on Thursday, about the tension in Major League Baseball in the wake of Ryan Braun’s successful appeal of a positive doping test, misstated the number of labor agreements in a row that the league reached without a work stoppage. The current one, completed in 2011, is the third in a row, not the second.

A version of this article appears in print on March 1, 2012, on page B13 of the New York edition with the headline: Bad Feelings Lingering Over Braun’s Victory. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe